


White Nights

by hes5thlazarus



Series: Dirthara Ma! [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alienages (Dragon Age), Angst, Angst and Humor, Bleak Humor, Canon Compliant, F/M, Post-Break Up, Post-Canon, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser DLC, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Tragic Romance, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Tension, Val Royeaux (Dragon Age), the Dostoyevsky crossover literally no one asked for but I wrote anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:40:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28248525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hes5thlazarus/pseuds/hes5thlazarus
Summary: A year after Trespasser, Lavellan takes a new lover to a quiet inn in Val Royeaux. She steps out to the balcony for a quick smoke under the stars, looks over to the balcony adjacent to hers--and who is there but the Dread Wolf himself, slightly disguised, with a glass of wine? Despite themselves they talk, and do not stop talking.“Entertain me,” Solas says. “What ending will Master Tethras write for us? Because I do not know how to leave this gracefully. Though I suppose any ending is better than the last one, when I left with your arm.”
Relationships: Anders/Female Lavellan (Dragon Age), Anders/Lavellan (Dragon Age), Female Inquisitor/Solas (Dragon Age), Female Lavellan/Solas, Lavellan & Solas, Lavellan/Solas (Dragon Age)
Series: Dirthara Ma! [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2086839
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28





	1. The Balcony

Sweat drying on her skin, she fishes a crumbled nightgown out of her pack and makes herself presentable. Anders snoozes on the bed, blissed into sleep. He surrenders himself so easily to passion. Lavellan watches him sleep, envious. She has always thought too much.   
  
She finds the leather pouch of tobacco cut with elfroot a former lover made her, prepares her pipe, and opens the shutters to the balcony to enjoy it properly. She lights it, smiling to herself. She has never really gotten a vacation, but under Divine Victoria’s new law, mages enjoy an untold-of freedom of movement. And while she has left the infrastructure behind her, she still has the money and prestige. Enjoy the world while it still lasts, he said. Lavellan snorts and smokes her pipe. She has embraced it utterly, the cool night clean on her skin. Below her the streets of Val Royeaux babble, and she can smell the ocean. They took a room a few streets from the Alienage: that too is new. The Inquisitor, retired or not, is different from other elves, even when she has that apostate lover in tow. If anything, the addition of Anders endears her to the gossips of Val Royeaux. She has always given them something to talk about. She traces out the Pleiades and smiles. An adoring lover, a sea coast, and one more day off? What more can she ask?   
  
The shutters of the balcony next to her rustle and she glances over to see a bearded man step out, face cast in shadow. Lavellan notes the ears: another one of the People made good. He’s clutching a bottle of wine. She admires his silhouette--Anders is well-built but not particularly shapely--as he sits on the edge of the balcony and pours himself a glass. He lights himself a candle and raises the glass to his lips. He glances at her curiously and freezes.   
  
Lavellan takes the pipe from her lips, iced under his gaze. The rosy post-coital warmth disappears as if she’s just leapt into the ocean. Solas’ lips move soundlessly as he tries and fails to articulate their mutual horror. She thinks dimly, at least I still make him speechless. She should have put her prosthetic back on.   
  
She says, “I won’t tell if you don’t.”   
  
Hand trembling, he raises his glass to his lips. He does not spill a drop. “I am leaving in the morning. I will leave earlier.” He drinks and sets the glass with a clink back onto the balcony’s edge. Still he stares at her. She supposes she looks just-fucked, because she is--hair ruffled, skin reddened, and nightgown thrown on carelessly. Anders likes to sleep nude.   
  
Lavellan laughs. “Wonderful. Hilarious. Three years Leliana has tried to track you,” and succeeded, but she will not tell him that, “and I find you on the opposite balcony, undressed. I suppose you thought the hair would be enough of a disguise.”   
  
Solas smiles. “It has worked before.”   
  
It hasn’t, but again she will not tell him that. “Certainly.” She puffs on her pipe and exhales smoke, watching it drift towards the street opposite. She can see light spilling behind the shutters of the floor opposite. Someone else like to fuck with the lights on. Lavellan smiles thinly. She remembers finding him in a tavern with Varric and Hawke, not too long about the Exalted Council. They had managed to find three of his eluvians in Ostwick and Kirkwall, thanks to his arrogance, and reclaim one of them. The beard does not disguise his face--or his swagger. She closes her eyes: unless this is all an elaborate double-bluff. What would Keeper Deshanna say? The wolf chews off his own leg to escape the trap. He has his back to the door, but both of his arms--and he can turn people to stone now, Morrigan confirmed. That would not be the worst thing he has done to her, though, would it?   
  
He is staring at her remaining hand, at the sylvanwood ring she now wears--a gift from Merrill, who said she needed it more. Lavellan laughs bitterly. “A Keeper’s ring,” she says. “I suppose you would not know the story. A relic of the People, to remind its leaders of the Dread Wolf’s betrayal. Though it was a lesson I never learned, and was read too late besides.”   
  
Solas flinches. “I had hoped it was a wedding ring.” He glances towards her room. From his perspective, she supposes, the unmade bed and the man in it are just visible, if he cranes his neck a bit, which he is doing. She is tired of looking at her life from his perspective.   
  
“Fuck you,” Lavellan says. She lays the pipe down carefully and half-closes the shutters. If Anders wakes up, he’ll see her--but Solas will not see him. But Justice will not allow him to attack an unarmed man, as if the Dread Wolf is ever without his weapons.   
  
“My apologies,” he says. “That was inappropriate. I...I have hoped you have been happy.”   
  
She looks at him incredulously. “Which is why you stalk my dreams at night, exactly like the nightmare of Dalish legends. To hope that I’m happy.” She gestures grandly. “Which is why you appear  _ here _ , at my balcony, on my  _ one _ vacation--”   
  
“An unfortunate coincidence,” Solas cuts in coldly. “And I will go. You know it has never been my intention to cause you pain.” He turns away and picks up his glass.   
  
“You took my arm off,” Lavellan says. Solas stops. “I didn’t realize that was an accident.”   
  
He turns around and to her amusement he is smiling wryly. He rubs his forehead. “It was eating at your bone marrow. But the next time an ancient artifact of untold power starts a cancer in your body, I will let it fester. Thank you for letting me know.”   
  
Lavellan watches him coolly and imagines rubbing the hot ashes of her tobacco into his face. Maybe it will leave a mark like the Anchor did, before it melted the skin from her muscle and disabled her permanently. It had stunk. None of the salves Vivienne had concocted had soothed it. The Anchor’s heat would melt through the leather of every glove she hid it in too, towards the end. She had known for a long time she would need to amputate it. She just had not thought it would take her whole forearm.   
  
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she says. She knows she should let him leave, but she wants to know. “If you knew it would--fester. Why did you leave without warning me?”   
  
Fear lances through Solas’ eyes, flickering in the candlelight. “I am not a cruel man,” he says instead.   
  
“That is not an answer.” She smiles unpleasantly, sitting down at the balcony’s edge, and crosses her legs. His eyes trace up her body. He looks afraid. She knows how he likes to use her, to defend himself and to flagellate himself against the fundamental truths of his being. The Dalish have pegged him right. He is a cruel man. He is a monster. He lost his humanity millennia ago, sacrificed on the grave of Mythal. Morrigan told her what the Well whispers. If the evanuris deserved untold punishment for killing the All-Mother, what is his due? The perpetual bleeding wound of what he did to her. Her stump itches, and she scratches at it pointedly: it has long since scabbed over, but he does like to pick at his wounds.   
  
“You have your life,” Solas says testily. “You have your freedom, and all the riches of the Inquisition. You have the time left to you. What else can I give to you?”   
  
Anger twists in her so viscerally she coughs at the bile rising in her throat. She steadies herself. “I am not your fucking petitioner, Solas. You’re no god of mine. You never were.” She stares back defiantly. After the Council, once Morrigan clarified the vallaslin did not bind her to the will of Mythal, she had Deshanna draw her brand brighter. She likes it. Mythal had watched her People suffer, killed by those who would sacrifice them. Her vallaslin is a promise: vengeance, for the world. All her gods have long been dead, and she is the last one standing. The agents of Fen’Harel have found little support amongst the Dalish and the elves of the Free Marches, Ferelden, and Orlais.   
  
Solas says, “I’m sorry.” A breeze drifts cold from the sea, and Lavellan shivers. This nightgown is meant to be taken off, not kept on. She glances inside. Anders is still asleep. He won’t be upset when she explains this to him, he’s had his fair share of bad exes--and been the bad ex. She has few illusions about him. He eases something in her, for now. He’s more attached to her than she is to him. She likes it that way, to hold someone loosely for once. He will not be the one who leaves. He idolizes her a little bit, but he doesn’t idealize her like Solas did.   
  
Solas follows her gaze and purses his lips. He says, “I am keeping you from your rest.” Neither of them move. He wears an ugly expression, made worse by the glowstones inlaid at the edge of the building, the candle still flickering on the balcony. She has always enjoyed the harsh angularity of his face and the starkness of his emotions. He seethes with discontent. Sometimes he channels it productively, passionately, but she can never forget that this is the man who stared at the Nightmare boredly, but raged at the useless Kirkwall mages.   
  
There is a foot between their balconies, and she is acutely conscious of the space. He could vaunt over it easily. So could she. Ugily he stares at her, burning her visage into him. She wonders: does he like what he sees? Does that matter? Of course it does. Uncomfortable, she taps her pipe against the balcony. She shakes her head, and smiling, says, “You still haven’t answered my question.”   
  
“What is there left to say?” Solas clenches his hands. “You have taken my measure. Why do you need me to stay what you already know?”   
  
“Because I don’t,” Lavellan says. “Because I want you to admit it. You left me to die in pain--” Solas steps closer, distressed, but she throws her arm up. “Don’t interrupt! You told me you loved me. You  _ fucked _ me. You,” she starts laughing, thinking about Crestwood, “you brought me to a swamp to show me ‘how much I meant to you.’” She is grinning now, staring at him. Solas looks wretched: as if that means something. “You tried to reenact your savior fantasy with me--’ar lasa mala revas,’ my ass. And when I objected, you left me. While claiming I meant the world to you. And then you let my arm rot off.”   
  
“There were--considerations.”   
  
“Corypheus,” Lavellan says bitterly. “The Blight that is coming. The decay that is spreading in the Emprise, despite how deep we dig. The wakened Titan. And, at the root of this all, Mythal.”   
  
Solas freezes. His eyes widen in surprise and he beams at her--but as quickly as the smile flashes across his face, it is gone. He arranges himself neutrally again, pointedly tucking his arms behind his back. That little familiar gesture still amuses her, as much as it makes her sad. She had thought he did that to keep from touching her. Even the gulf between them is not enough. He still wants to reach for her--he won’t, of course, but it pings her vanity to know he wants to. He utters, “Well done.”   
  
Lavellan says, “You’re a patronizing prick, do you know that?”   
  
“You certainly aren’t the first who’ve told me that,” Solas replies, amused. Despite himself, he has crept to the very edge of the balcony. She reaches for him and he takes her hand, helping her to her feet. He puts his hand on her waist to steady her. The embrace is clumsy; there is a foot between them and three storeys below them. She does not let go of his hand, he does not let of her waist, and when she looks up Solas bites his lip.   
  
“Fenhedis,” he says, and kisses her. She grips his arm to keep from falling. Kissing him is so easy. She does not need to think, but sighs raggedly into the embrace. They break the kiss but do not pull away. He rests his forehead against hers, awkwardly bracing his knee against the opposite balcony. He looks like he is about to leap over to join her, or fall between them. She smiles ironically. A year ago she would have muttered, “Dread Wolf take me,” at a kiss as devastating as this: but so he has, again.   
  
Lavellan nuzzles at his face and murmurs, “I cannot go into your room.” She draws an arbitrary boundary, when she has already crossed the threshold. Anders still lays sleeping in the bed behind her. She thinks to herself, I can gather information. He wants to stay with me. He wants me to stay. He has always said it is easy to tell me  _ too much _ , whatever that means. I can bind him to that. This is not an excuse. She looks up at him. Solas rests his hand on her shoulder, eyes tender. “Meet me outside.”   
  
“I owe you that,” Solas says vaguely, and Lavellan raises an eyebrow. That, too, is an excuse, more patronizing than hers. She can use that. She thinks she can use that. She has her anger to whip the lines she will not cross into her feet. They carefully pull away from each other. One false move, and the other falls between the balconies. Lavellan finds her pipe, still smoldering slightly, and Solas collects his wine and candle. Before she closes the shutters, she turns and sees him watching her. He says, “I love you. Though we both know you deserve better. I love you.”   
  
“Stop it,” Lavellan says, and he laughs. She closes the shutters, smiling as tears dot at her eyes. She places the pipe on her dresser and goes to her lover. Lavellan leans over Anders and whispers, “Wake up--don’t say anything.” Anders frowns in his sleep, and she shakes his shoulder gently. “Quietly.” He turns, alarmed, so Lavellan puts her hand over his mouth. She whispers, “The Dread Wolf rented the room next to us.”   
  
Anders rubs his eyes and sits up, careful not to let the bed creak. “What the fuck?”    
  
She shushes him. “I’m serious,” she whispers. “And we’re going on a walk. Use the crystal to call Leliana if I’m not back by dawn.”   
  
Anders says, “You’re serious.” Sleep falling from his eyes, he focuses on her face and reaches for her. Healer’s hands: she takes his hand and presses a kiss into the palm. He traces the outline of her lips with his thumb. Guilt grasps her, and she moves away from his touch. His face falls. “You’re going on a night walk with the Dread Wolf. Your ex. The Dread Wolf--who not only put the Veil up in the first place, but wants to tear it down and kill us all.”   
  
She tenses. “Keep your voice down. He doesn’t think I’d wake you. Have that much faith in me.” Quietly she slides off of him and pulls off her dress. She shoots him a look over her shoulder, hoping to distract him, but he is clearly displeased. Quickly she pulls on underclothes, a tunic, leggings--but she can feel him fretting silently.   
  
“I won’t stop you,” Anders says finally. “But you do realize what this looks like to me.” He is completely still, playing along for her.   
  
Lavellan straps on her prosthetic and fits a jar of bees into the compartment. She brandishes it at him, and Anders smiles slightly. She walks over to him and kisses him gently.   
  
“I’ll be back before dawn,” she says firmly. “And if I’m not--he’d kill me, not kidnap me.” She taps her sylvanwood ring with her prosthetic clumsily. “He does not think I would wake you. While we’re gone, check the guest registry. I want to know what name he used. And then call Leliana.” Pointedly she hands him the sending crystal. Anders sighs. “I’ll be back,” she repeats. And I’ll keep him walking and talking so I won’t fuck him, too, she adds silently. “And we’ll regroup in the morning.”


	2. The Docks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They walk, and they keep talking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Solas and Lavellan discuss whether or not he "laid with her under false pretenses." Neither come to a conclusion.

In the dull lamplight Solas is almost unrecognizable, with the gray in his closely-cropped hair, the carefully groomed beard. Still, she recognizes the silhouette, and part of her thrills to see him. She had hoped he would have already left. She draws closer and notices the embroidery of his shirt: a gift from Clan Lavellan. She touches the filigree at the collar and traces the edge of his jaw. His breathing catches. He is also afraid. They are making a mistake, and she knows she will have to hold herself partly culpable for this.   
  
“So,” she says, and waits for him to fill in the silence. Instead Solas puts his hands behind his back, and she rolls her eyes.    
  
“This is a mistake,” he says tightly.   
  
Yet he came anyway. “So you’ve told me, from the beginning,” Lavellan says pleasantly, “one of many horrible little things you did to me. Still, you keep cropping up. Unavoidable, actually. Like a fungus.”   
  
A smile ghosts across his face as they both remember Cassandra. “I am sorry. Loving you--”   
  
“I wish you wouldn’t apologize,” Lavellan interrupts, “when you are going to repeat what you did, over and over again. Banal’nadas. The Blight is inevitable. We don’t have time to relitigate this.”   
  
Solas takes a shaky breath. “No. We don’t.” He lets his arms fall to his sides, relaxing his shoulders. She takes his hand. He looks at her ring ruefully. “You have always liked symbolic gestures. Your vallaslin--”   
  
“I want to show you something,” Lavellan stops him. She lifts her chin, makes a face. “To show you what you mean to me.” She squeezes his hand. “Come with me.”   
  
Solas winces dramatically. “I suppose it was foolish to hope you would not remember my worse words. Where are you taking me?”   
  
She says drily, “Not a swamp.”    
  
Solas rubs the back of his neck, embarrassed. “It wasn’t a swamp when I was there last...perhaps two thousand years ago.”   
  
“What was it then? A sewer?”   
  
Solas thinks for a second then twists his mouth wryly. “I have called it a cesspool before.” He laughs at the face Lavellan makes.   
  
“Fine,” she says. “Keep your secrets.” She starts forward, tugging him along, and she both enjoys and hates the slight bounce to his step as he matches her. Walking with him was always like a dance, twisting in and out of each other’s magnetic orbit.   
  
“It was my house,” Solas bursts out. “Or at least the place that held my laboratory, when I was still…working with the Halla-Mother. Where I decided to break with the Evanuris and Geldauron’s clique both. I had planned to tell you everything.”   
  
She stops so suddenly he stumbles. He looks at her, afraid, and she lets go of his hand and touches the plastered wall of the building at the corner to ground herself, closing her eyes at the sudden rage that has swept her. He waits, awkwardly, as she breathes. They have done this routine before, of course, she has always struggled with her anger. She reminds herself of what she can feel: cobblestone worn smooth below her feet, ocean-cold air on her skin, the metal end of the prosthetic digging into what is left of her arm. The Veil is so thin now, and she does not want what could have been to tear it.   
  
Solas says, “I should not have told you that. That I was going to tell you.”   
  
“No,” she agrees. That possibility sits between them, and throws its arms around them companionably: there could have been another way. It should not be like this. Lavellan rubs the bridge of her nose, trying to calm herself down.   
  
“You are angry,” Solas says warily.   
  
“Did you expect applause?” She flexes the fingers of the prosthetic, as if to check if they still work. The middle finger sticks slightly, and she bends it back into a fist. She does not want to look back at him and see the pity and shame cross his face. She has built her life out of the ashes from Haven, and he has not been the worst thing to happen to her. She has survived worse humiliations. She smiles grimly. At least she is still moving.   
  
Solas says, “I have always been too rash in matters of the heart, and even after these long years, I have not yet learned moderation. I indulged myself at the wrong moments, and held back too. And for that, I am sorry.” He sounds like his Keeper has made him sit and think about his apology before reciting it aloud. It has the touch of rehearsal--but Solas has always thought themselves in some tragedy. Lavellan had always thought she was the lead of her own play, but it seems she has been upstaged.   
  
Lavellan musters herself to look at him. His eyes are pleading. The beard is ridiculous. She touches it, tracing where he has trimmed it along his jawline. He closes his eyes and leans into the touch like a cat. “I am not your Keeper,” she says. “There is no reason to confess. And I don’t forgive you, anyway. As you said. This is yet another one of your mistakes.”   
  
Solas does not rise to the bait. He rarely does. “Where are you taking me?”   
  
Lavellan does not know. She picks a street and keeps moving, and he matches her stride. His arm brushes against hers. They look in opposite directions, lost in their mutual self-pity. The night itself is liquid, a wet breeze teasing through the narrow streets. Magelight spills onto the cobbes, worn smooth by three hundred years of human occupation. Her great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side had been from Val Royeaux. He had died in yet another failed raid on Halamshiral, long before her mother was born. The streets are as old as history, and she misses her misspent youth, running goods from Orlais to the Free Marches, taking the Minanter through half of Thedas and leaving friends and enemies in her wake. Tomorrow she and Anders will visit some of them, and see what has changed. She has to clean her mother-in-law’s grave, too. She wonders what her late husband would have thought of this, what he would say. He would say something clever about her moving from the slapstick comedy of their smuggling career to epic tragedy.   
  
She says casually, “You know I met my husband here. When I was a student, working for Briala. And then when the Carta began paying me better.”   
  
Solas has always been amused by her past. He enjoyed the rumors flitting about her wake, and how they twisted him into it. The truth was stranger than the story, and the story served to entertain. He says, “Mahanon? Yes.”    
  
They duck into an alleyway that has an unguarded gate into the alienage--an example of Briala’s munificence. Before Solas stole the key, Briala had kept an eluvian there. A sick hatred rises up her throat, and Lavellan swallows as they turn into the elvhen quarter. A statue of Fen’Harel faces outward, away from the Vhenadahl. Solas grimaces and pats its head. She steers them away from the Vhenadahl--he does not deserve it--and towards the docks. Jasmine vines up the ancient buildings that date to the Exalted March, and she breathes in that heady scent with a rush of nostalgia--for whom, for what, she cannot tell. Perhaps herself, before--before all of this, before love. As they pass, Solas plucks a blossom and places it in his pocket. A perishable souvenir, she thinks: quickling memory. How apt.   
  
Solas says, “I was surprised to find how effectively you and Briala had seeded the various great ports of Orlais and the Free Marches with your organizers. And you joined the Friends of Red Jenny, did you not? An interesting move, considering their decentralization cripples their coordination. But it does leverage you into the back alleys of Denerim, Antiva City, and the Grand Necropolis. Though the Qunari invasion has stymied their recruitment efforts in Tevinter.”   
  
He is wrong, but she will not tell him that. “The Qunari,” she hedges. “They think if they find out your name, they can reveal your true nature and master you.”   
  
Solas chuckles. “I was, and always have been, Pride first. Fen’Haril, and then Harel,” he grimaces, and Lavellan cannot help the rush of affection at how he is still affronted over the name, Keeper Deshanna reckoned the vowel shift must have occurred over two thousand years ago, he has been quietly seething over it since before the fall of Arlathan, “--came during the war. And if Mythal could not master her pride, I have no doubt the Qunari will likewise fail.” The street widens as they approach the dock but he bumps into her anyway. She tucks her good arm into his. They can pretend they are old lovers and not political enemies locked in a cold war. They can accept that they are old lovers, currently locked in a tense nonaggression pact. Lavellan’s mouth twists. Leliana will be so horribly pleased with the whole situation. It is all so terribly Orlesian.   
  
Lavellan asks, “Who named you?” She does not expect him to answer. They reach the docks, and he turns to her, smiling.   
  
“Do you know,” he says, “you are the first person who has bothered to ask me that? Most assume I chose the insult for myself.”   
  
“Yes,” she says. “You’re far too proud to laugh at yourself.” He is avoiding the question, but he has still revealed that he has kept a close eye on the Red Jennys, which Sera suspected but could not confirm.   
  
“I have you to do that for me. You keep me humble.”   
  
“And here I thought it was Cassandra and her Smite that kept you from picking fights. With anyone but Vivienne, Iron Bull, Thom, Sera--didn’t you have a go at Varric once? What did you call Orzammar? Ah, yes. ‘The severed arm of a once-great empire.’ But now I know you were projecting. Is that what you call the Dalish? Twitching to give the appearance of life. Never dreaming,” Lavellan says bitterly. “Left for dead.”   
  
Solas looks at her strangely. “Not anymore,” he says quietly. He walks to the edge of the dock and sits down gingerly, avoiding wet spots and fish guts. He leans back, feet dangling above the water, and looks up at the stars. It is a beautiful night in Val Royeaux, and Lavellan’s heart catches. She remembers too much--friends long dead, friends lost, her first husband. She sighs and sits next to him. He shifts closer to her, pressing his leg against hers. He still smells the same.   
  
“Tell me about this place,” he requests. “It holds some significance to you.”   
  
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. Those stories are not meant for him. In another world, she would tell him about the Portinari boys, about Sylanna and Garta and Briala’s first girlfriend, and maybe she would have even told him how she asked Mahanon to leave Val Royeaux, on a night as cool as this. But, as he himself told her, that world is not this one. It cannot be. She says instead, “You were going to tell me your name.” She rests her head on his shoulder.    
  
He nuzzles into her hair and breathes deeply. Such an odd thing, scent: he must miss it too. He puts his arm around her, tentatively at first. When it is clear to both of them she will not pull away, he holds her tighter, and takes her hand. Solas says, “You know my name.”   
  
Lavellan says mildly, “You know lying by omission is still a lie.”   
  
“No--” Solas draws back, and the wooden pier creaks beneath them.   
  
“Careful,” Lavellan says. “Don’t fall in.”   
  
Solas stares at her. “I never lied to you. I...may have misled you. My meaning may have been ambiguous. Our language is one of intents, my heart.” Lavellan’s frown deepened. “You know my intent. In that I have always been clear.” He looks at her, afraid, and he braces himself for what she will say next. Lavellan thinks, oh I don’t want to talk about this oh but there’s no going back oh I should’ve stayed with Anders and ignored this white night. Solas says, desperation in his voice, “Our time together may not be kind for either of us--it isn’t. We both know that. But I did not lie to you. I did  _ not _ lie with you under false pretenses!”   
  
Lavellan says slowly, “Is that guilt I hear in your voice?” Her mouth twists, and Solas’ lips thin. “I do think you protest too much, Dread Wolf. Fen’Harel, or  _ Haril _ \--whatever you call yourself.” Solas opens his mouth to interrupt but a furious look from Lavellan silences him. “You know you did wrong by me. You know what your name is, you know what you should have told me. You--dishonored me, you lied to me--do you think I would’ve fucked you if I knew--”   
  
“Then why am I here?” Solas demands. “Why are you here? Tell me--why do you keep  _ tormenting _ \--”   
  
“Me or your conscience?” Lavellan snaps. “Nosing at the edges of my dreams! You use me to torture yourself, because you’re guilty and you know you’re guilty, but you’re too proud to admit it so you’ll keep wearing me like a hairshirt--”   
  
“I did not force you,” Solas hisses. “I  _ asked _ you to leave. You pulled me back from the door. Every time. Time and again, I warned you. This...connection has been cruel from the beginning.” He puts his head in his hands and breathes deeply. Lavellan is momentarily concerned, but anger is burning below her skin, despite the chill off the ocean. “If that is what you think…” He is at the brink of tears. “If that is what I have done to you.” He swallows hard. Lavellan is unmoved. “I have been nothing but myself, and my worst self, with you. I was Solas first and I have been Solas since. Did you expect me to tell you, when Cassandra held us both prisoner--oh, to keep us on even standing, I am the monster of your people’s mythology.” He laughs bitterly, wiping furiously at his eyes. He smiles at her sardonically. “Do you think I did not rehearse it constantly in my mind? From when I gave Tarasyl’an Telas, to Wisdom’s murder--and what would you have done? Would you have treated me fairly? Would you have given me hearing?”   
  
“I don’t know,” Lavellan says. “Did you, for me?” She meets his gaze steadily. He is at the brink of tears, which brings out the almost violent tinge to his gray eyes. She tells herself she is unmoved. She has watched him cry before, in fear and loneliness, when he could not sleep for the nightmares in the Emprise. They had both been haunted by the mines, and he had been particularly upset at the report that the red lyrium had taken root. Now she knows: he understands the rot has sunk into the soil, eating away at the people, and he was despairing. Then she had been worried for him, now she is glad. Finally, Solas looks away, ashamed as he had been in that ridiculous armor. They both enjoy a good costume performance, but she has him as stripped as she feels.   
  
Solas says, “Why are we here? To growl at each other like two territorial wolves, and sniff out what the other knows and does not know. Now you know the Blight that is upon us. You know this world have been doomed since Corypheus slaughtered the city of Kirkwall to break open the Black City.”   
  
“Before,” Lavellan says. “The Titan. I found your bolthole in the Crossholds. For a man who keeps his secrets close, you do like to dangle half-truth all over your walls.”   
  
Solas laughs hollowly. “I paint. That is what I am, before I am called to Mythal’s service.” Lavellan notes the change in tense, but allows it to pass without comment. “So now you know.”   
  
“Dread Wolf,” Lavellan says. “Fen’Harel. Fen’Haril. Rebel. At the feet of Mythal. And Pride first, Pride before all. I’ll spare you the pun about the fall.”   
  
“Two millennia too late for that,” Solas says. “But you are the only one counting.”   
  
She cannot help but smile at that. She stretches her legs and throws herself down to the pier, looking up at the still-visible stars. Solas looks down at her, fondness mixed with sadness. She squints and picks out a familiar pattern to the embroidery of his shirt.   
  
“I gave you that,” she says. “My clan sent that to you. I didn’t know you kept it.” She lifts a hand to his collar and examines the filigree. The magic responds, familiar: her aunt Ithilien sewed the pattern, but Deshanna enchanted it. They thought she would bring him home. From his collar, she moves her hand to his neck, traces it down to his collarbone, and contemplates tightening her grip. Solas closes his eyes.   
  
“Stop,” he says.   
  
She does not remove her hand. His heart beats steadily under her palm. They wait, listening to the waves gently lap against the shore, the planks of the pier creak, the carousing from beyond them, in the alienage cafes. She remembers fucking her first husband down at the docks, both daring in plain view of the moonlight, then more slowly in the shadows, even overturning, laughing, a boat, grabbing at some poor fisherman’s net. She looks up at Solas. She can imagine him grunting, half in pleasure, half in pain, her scrabbling to get him out of his clothes--perhaps someone opening their shutters to see what the noise is about and rolling their eyes at these two horny middle-aged elves. What good would it do, what pleasure would she take from it? She misses sharply the feel of his skin against hers, she misses him holding her hot against him, all those freezing nights.   
  
She says, “Do you remember those nights in the Hissing Wastes?”   
  
He says, “And those languid days.” He wraps his hand around hers and removes it from his neck. “My heart.”   
  
“Melodramatic,” Lavellan says. “Cassandra will love it.”   
  
“High intrigue,” he adds. “Devastating to us both.” He lies down next to her and caresses her shoulder. “Varric will pillory me in song. More than he already has.” She snorts. “Truly, he could not have helped Maryden come up with a better rhyme? And the  _ book _ . That book--is the moonlight still glinting off my ears? Or has the effect changed, since I grew out my hair?”   
  
“He misspelled my name,” Lavellan says. “Called me by my matronym. I think he did it on purpose.”   
  
“Entertain me,” Solas says. “What ending will Master Tethras write for us? Because I do not know how to leave this gracefully. Though I suppose any ending is better than the last one, when I left with your arm.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Lavellan says, “you’re not allowed to make me laugh after I’ve made you cry.”

“Rules of engagement,” Solas says. “You do not strangle me, I let any cancers you encounter strangle  you--no laughing, but we can both cry.”

Lavellan presses in closer to him, eyes sparkling. “But only in the moonlight, under a,” she glances up  quickly, “waning gibbous moon.”

“Obscure as your wit,” Solas says. “Agreed.” A draft of wind shivers over them, and they pull together.  Lavellan feels hollow, exhausted, as emotional as the tides sucking at the Val Royeaux beach. Solas is  watching her. He always is. He says, “We will not meet again.”

“One hopes,” she says. “Why that inn? Why Val Royeaux?”

“Because I am tired,” he says simply. “Because I like this city. I did not want to stay in the alienage and think  of you, and the hotelier did not sneer and call the guard when he saw my ears. And you?”

She parrots back, “Because I am tired. Because I love this city. Because I cannot bring a human to the  alienage, and the hotelier did not call for the guards when he saw me too.” Solas’ eyes flicker, and he pulls  away from her. She thinks, jealous? Good. He thinks of her in Val Royeaux, he thinks of her in the  alienage--just this one, or in general? They stayed in the alienage, when Cassandra brought her to testify to  the Chantry. The four of them had had a good time.   
  
“You should go to your lover,” Solas says. “Before he wakes.”   
  
Lavellan smiles thinly. He thinks she lied to him--a lie of omission, but a lie nonetheless. “And you to your empty bed?”   
  
He snorts. “Empty, and lonely, and ever-desiring what I should not. I have not changed much.”   
  
She is flattered despite herself, and triumphant, but then remembers that he has always laid the flattery a little too thick. “Desire?” she says teasingly. “What do you want?”   
  
He stares at her. “Life. More life. And not to die alone.”


	3. The Broadsheet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lavellan leaves, and Solas wanders. He goes to a barber shop, he is accosted by a drunk young man, and settles down to read at the Cafe Vhenadahl--where all roads in Val Royeaux lead.

She leaves and he lays down on the pier listening to the tide til he can breathe again. He should not have come here, but how often he thinks that, how often he regrets. The city will wake soon, and she will leave, and he will have only a miracle to marvel over--that they were contemporaries, born three millennia apart, that what was once an encampment of wattle-and-daub turned into plaster islands. What a miracle, that these vast blinking buildings witnessed the two of them talk. He pulls himself up and crosses his legs, forcing himself to stare out to the horizon and ignore the city at his back. It does no good to mythologize. Val Royeaux has grown. It has witnessed many great loves. She had met her husband here, Solas knows. He cannot pretend he has marked this landscape for her, and he cedes that his interpretation of this place is now totally shaped by her. He may have been here first, of course, catching a glimpse at those rather fetid quicklings, but she has made this world hers.  
  
Solas thinks, I live in a world of her intervention. His lips quirk into a rueful smile: is a pun bad if there is no one else to hear it? Don’t think about what she would think. Invention, intervention: he sees is, shapes it in his image, and she intervenes.   
  
The black sky begins to purple, and the horizon becomes distinguishable. Solas stands up and stretches his weary back. He is growing old by everyone’s standards. He strokes his beard thoughtfully. Truly he should not have underestimated their ability for recall. He always assumed he was little more than a pair of pointed ears to the Inquisition, and that if he softened his strongest features, he could pass unnoticed. Arrogant, foolish, he sighs. It had been fun while it lasted. He needs to get a shave, and barbershops have always been wonderful places to measure the pulse of a place. He does like to wax dramatic about battlefields and the like, but he loves the little clinging wisps who bite, curious, into a memory of a vain man regretting his weak chin, or a woman laughing as she is presented with a balding head. He touches his hairline self-consciously. He is aging, by everyone’s standards. Perhaps he should shave it again too.   
  
The things of the body distract from the unsolvable misery of the mind. He turns back into the Val Royeaux alienage, thinking about dying. The world has been in decay: true, but what is living but a slow death? It is moronic, cheap philosophy, an excuse for despair. He has met a woman he would rather not live without, and so, chose a quicker death. Mythal’s justice will see that his sacrifice has meaning. Solas passes by a shrine built into a recess in the wall and pauses, curious to see whom it commemorates.   
  
The All-Mother as the dragon stands, wings outstretched, flanked by two halla rampant. All three stone figurines are garlanded with flowers. Mythal wears a necklace of what the humans call Andraste’s Grace. Ghilan’nain wears embrium. In the plaster framing the shrine, someone scratched a snarling wolf, directed towards the docks and the alienage exit. Solas sours. He ripped the world asunder so the people may be free. He thought he had banished the remnants of the false gods to the Beyond, locked in the eluvians of Arlathan. He had thought wrong. All that remained of Elvhenan were its most egregious acts: the brand of the vallaslin and the haughty silence of their gods. And he is not even allowed within, he who had shaken them to freedom in the first place. But isn’t freedom a sin?   
  
His agents tell him of the horror and disgust they felt, when they found that the vallaslin was a slave mark--that that was what their revered ancestors had decided to preserve. Some petty lordling kept marking his serfs, even as their cities fell out of the sky, and that was all that remained--the need to brand _ownership_ on each other. Solas clenches his fists, the usual rage stirring his skin too taut. He ripped away what had made them _them_ . Brutality was his only legacy. As soon as he fell into uthenera, the People fell upon each other--and to Tevinter, and to the Chantry, and to the Blight.   
  
He mutters to himself, “Banal nadas,” and walks away from the shrine. Nothing is inevitable. The Void is inevitable. Small comfort, in times with little comfort: but he must endure.   
  
Solas walks through the quiet shuttered streets, pulling his cloak around him. He huffs. He does not enjoy journeying through the night anyway, not as he had as a youth. He likes to sleep, not only because his body only seems set and under his own agency when he returns to the Fade, but because each day takes so much from him. He is not so lost as he had been with the Inquisition, he tells himself, but of course he does not know where he is in these spiralling streets, he does not know where he has left his heart, he does not know when he will return to that hotel. He had not left anything he needs, he could keep moving. He cannot afford the risk of seeing her again, but of course he must, because he finds himself tracing her footsteps. This had been her home. She had lived here for her most formative year, learned that Orlesian drawl from quietly serving in the kitchens of the Val Royeaux nobility, met the father of her children and galvanized her whole life. Solas puts a hand over his face, grimacing. She is dying, she will die anyway. When he raised the Veil, he took away her right to life.   
  
His beard feels greasy, like costume make-up. He catches sight of himself distorted in a puddle and sighs. He had always been minimalist in his appearance, besides his dress armor, which is admittedly ridiculous. Mythal had commissioned that for him, and he had loved her for it, because it was exactly the sort of camp he adores. He looks at the gray in his hair and his beard and smiles ruefully. He has grown too old for that flamboyance, perhaps, though he will always love a dramatic costume. But this is who he is now: a tired man, running sick in middle age, wearing muted but well-tailored robes. His head itches and he wrinkles his nose. It was popular both in Elvhenan and this strange new world for men to shave their heads; back then, it had made him anonymous. But now he is too tall, and Lavellan always told him his swagger is unmistakable. He once heard Iron Bull giggle to Dorian that he shakes his ass while he walks, which well--it is amusing that Iron Bull was looking.   
  
Solas resolves suddenly to shave his head and beard. There is no point in keeping the hair if he is still recognizable with it--yet another useless vanity, like how well-fitting his tunic and leggings are. Luckily, the barbershops of Val Royeaux are still open. They are part of the social fabric of the city and the alienage, and he stops at the first one he finds. The occupants glance at him curiously: a man reading a cheaply-printed broadsheet that he recognizes as Lavellan’s own paper, a barber carefully cutting a woman’s hair, and a half-undressed harlequin, who has taken off their cowl but not their greasepaint. Solas smiles slightly. He does enjoy what has become of Val Royeaux.   
  
The barber is talking politics, as one does. He looks up briefly to flick Solas with his eyes to the next chair. Solas sits in the chair and makes himself comfortable. He watches and listens.   
  
“Mythal knows Briala won’t be able to keep Gaspard in check for much longer,” the barber says. The woman, his customer, grunts. “Particularly with the Inquisition troops discharged. Mind, I don’t mind having those boys back in the Dales, especially since they know how to be led by an elf. Pious, sure, but not hateful. But what will they do when the guards come? What shem turns against their own kind?”   
  
“The Divine did,” the man with the broadsheet says. He folds it in half, ink on his fingers. “She restored Shartan.”   
  
The woman snorts. She sits up in her chair and pushes the barber’s hand away. Turning to him, she says, “Lovely. So we can go into the Chantry and sing Shartan’s canticle in Orlesian now, and if you want your daughter can join and spread the Maker’s light.”   
  
“Not my daughter,” the man says, amused. “She’s going to Manon’s school, and the Keeper’s college after that.”   
  
“Then you see my point,” she says. “The emptiness of the gesture. We’re allowed to worship in _their_ spaces. What about our own? I’d believe it if she had them all singing Shartan in Dalish Tevene.”   
  
“Do you even know Dalish Tevene?” the barber snorts. “Not even those Fen’Harel types speak that.”   
  
Solas watches silently. The man with the broadsheet asks, “Which types? Fen’Harel’s Teeth or those...agents of the god? Because I’ve met Imladris Ashallin, and heard her sing it in the original--her Mahanon wrote the music, remember him?”   
  
“The god’s people.” The barber waves the scissors at him. “That cult that keeps prophesying a new Elvhenan. I’ll take the Freemen of the Dales over that nugshit. Who cares what we were two thousand years ago? If Briala doesn’t do something soon, we’re all fucked. You remember what they did to Halamshiral. I’m telling you, if you start seeing guards at the gates again--it’s time to run.”   
  
Solas crosses his legs and holds his head up. “Where?” he asks. “Where will you go if the guards block the gates? Where will you go if the fight comes your way?”   
  
The barber says, “You want a trim or a shave? Looking a little greasy, lethallin.” The harlequin suddenly gets up and heads to the back. The woman in her chair sighs and stands. She pats the back of her bobbed hair, and swings her head side to side.   
  
“Good job,” she says. “Loved the talk. Now, I’m going to head to the Vhenadahl and see if the revelry’s stopped. By now, they’ll be playing the ballads, and you know how I like to be sad.” She pays. Solas recognizes the flash of coin as a new mint. It has a Dalish mask etched onto it. He knows they are popular in the alienages across the Chantry’s remit. He knows few use them outside what passes as elvhenan.   
  
The barber says, “So. Shave? Haircut? Both?”   
  
“Both,” Solas says. “As you said yourself--I have seen better days.”   
  
He leaves the shop a few coins lighter and a copy of the broadsheet under his arm. Dawn is breaking. The wind is cool against his scraped skin. He wanders towards the center of the district, picking out narrow side streets, pondering what he has heard. The elves of Val Royeaux remember the pogroms, what the Inquisitor had called the Harrowing of Halamshiral, and he knows the emperor’s men hunt Dalish for sport when the Marquise is otherwise detained. He has had plenty of Dalish come his way, seeking justice otherwise denied to them, and though he has no plans for war with Orlais once Tevinter and the Qun are finished throttling each other, perhaps he should coach his recruits to change their approach. Religiosity certainly works amongst the slaves of Tevinter and the disenchanted of Ferelden. In Orlais, they need something more ecumenical. He has never been fond of cults, but has allowed his lieutenants to adapt to their condition as they deem fit. It is clear he must instill some sort of discipline, because this reputation has gotten well out of hand. He would rather they call them terrorists than cultists. Elvhenan will return, not from the devotion of the People, but their sheer bloody-mindedness.   
  
Dawn creeps rosy-fingered through the blue as best it could. Solas’ leg aches, a very ancient injury, and he stops to stretch. He glances worriedly upwards, anticipating rain, and then someone flings himself over his leg. Solas grabs him by the collar and steadies him onto his feet.   
  
“Ma serannas, hahren,” the young man says. “I am very drunk.”   
  
Solas is amused despite himself. “I can smell that,” he says. The boy smells very strongly of aniseed, and his collar is stained. He is carelessly good-looking, in a way that makes Solas envy his lost youth. It has been a very long time since those white nights spent carousing through Arlathan, between endless campaigns and before the last war. The drunk young man stares at him blearily.   
  
“The bald,” he says. “It suits you.”   
  
Solas laughs. “Yes,” he says. He nudges him gently forward, but the man slopes and grabs at him unsteadily. Solas instinctively takes him by his wrists. The young man licks his lips. Solas very quickly releases him, but does not back away. He does not want to give him a reason to step closer.   
  
“You have eyes like a pride demon,” the young man says. “Do you want to get a drink?”   
  
Orlesians: Solas cannot stop himself from groaning aloud. Besides the hidden truth that Solas is at least three millennia his senior, he looks at least twice his age. Solas himself had always fished around the young, when he was a wild youth. “No,” he says. “Please sober up.”   
  
“Now you really do sound like my father,” the young man says.   
  
Solas says, “Have you ever met a man called Dorian Pavus? I do truly think you would enjoy each other.”   
  
“Ugh,” the young man says. “I am done with dread Tevenes with flighty hearts. I will--fling my emotions to the dungheap,” he demonstrates, pressing both hands to his chest and flinging them out, “and then seek passion only for passion’s sake. No intimacy, no late-night confessions, no _building plans_ .” Solas is intrigued despite himself. Mythal would call it his insatiable appetite for gossip; Solas prefers to think it is his generous love for people, in all their forms. The drunk young man sees his interest. “Yes, for he _wanted to go into business_ , in my own father’s house! As if my father would ever condone the match.”   
  
He feels like he has stepped into the prologue of some wonderfully silly Orlesian opera: a prodigal son, a forbidden love, and an angry father. Solas asks, “What sort of business?”   
  
The boy smiles. “Mask-making, of course. For the elves of Orlais. To celebrate the dawn of the restoration of our natural nobility. I could make one for you, though you have such an interesting face, it’d be a shame to mask it.” He laughs, staggering back a bit. “Love and profit! What am I saying? My father would love the opportunity. True artisans, we could become. Who cares that he’s Tevene, and at least three-quarters shem? He loves me, and I might love him!”   
  
It is almost a tragedy that this boy met his “dread Tevene” rather than Master Pavus, though Solas knows he is quite happy with his occasional rendezvous with the Iron Bull. He empathizes with the boy: he has loved many people, but that has not made them partners. Love does not necessarily make a relationship steady enough to commit. He hesitates, Lavellan as always a step away from his mind. She would be utterly amused by this scene. He wishes he could tell her. She looked like she needs to laugh.   
  
“Da’len,” Solas says, “it would be better if you do than if you do not. Take what happiness you can, while this world still lasts.”   
  
“Fenhedis,” the young man says, “you’re not one of those Fen’Harel cultists, are you?” He waves a hand dismissively at him, as uniquely Orlesian as any courtier Solas spotted at court. “Go off to your reckoning, lethallin, I’ve got my life to live.”   
  
Solas says, “I truly hope you do,” and walks away.   
  
The morning has come upon him, thin and cool. Solas is irritated from lack of sleep and, he must admit, the blow to the ego this night has been. What had he expected? Lavellan always surprises him, leaving wrong-footed and reaching for excuses like he has never had before. The elves of Val Royeaux view him with disdain, and brand him a hypocrite. He has not amassed a cult. He has always avoided the worship, even when Mythal would force him to perform, and it has been a long time since he has been bound by the vallaslin. He touches his face, comfortingly smooth. Removing the brands left little scarring. What remains are his own mistakes. He has bungled the whole approach, but at least he has learned a lesson: though flamboyant and cynical like the People always were, the elves of Val Royeaux do not trust any lost promise, not like the Dalish of the Dirth, or the elves of ravaged Halamshiral. They may be doubtful of Briala, but they trust in her, even as they prepare to flee when she fails. Solas sighs. He wonders how so many have heard of his agents so quickly, and how their reputation has been so quickly established. He glances at the broadsheet he took from the barbershop. Perhaps this cheap printed pamphlet will answer his questions--and he has always enjoyed an excuse to analyze how Lavellan’s mind works.   
  
He ambles to the Vhenadahl and finds himself a table at a near-by cafe. Val Royeaux is renowned for its cafe culture, and its alienage is no exception. The waiter insists on bringing him a milky cup of java, some drink the Qunari popularized, after their expansion into Seheron, and a fresh croissant. He folds the paper and begins to read the editorial, written by the woman he unabashedly still loves:   
  
“The Dread Wolf does not lie but omits the truth. I should know. I slept with him.” He snorts. He continues to read, sipping gingerly at the cup, “We know the truth that our gods were slavers and our markings the mark of our ancestors’ slavery. But, my people, we are not our ancestors. The Dalish wear the vallaslin with Pride,” the missprint catches his eye, “because we know it is the mark of those that survived. Though he does not understand it, he has let the children of his fallen empire survive more wholly than they could have under any reformation of ancient Elvhenan. Because the people, the ordinary laboring people, who fought for their freedom to begin with, outlasted those that had bound them to their will. Shartan rose, and in constant mien’harellin the People have followed. We know that though we are occupied, we have never been truly conquered. For we are the Elvhen, and never do we submit.”   
  
Solas places the broadsheet down onto the table and slams his hand over it, angry now. He stares unseeingly at the piazza, barely registering the flowering Vhenadahl reaching taller than even the alienage walls. The slow arrow has struck, and he is the monster. Felassan clearly got around more than he assumed. Felassan knew Briala, and Briala knows Lavellan. He had never supposed them such good friends, but of course they must be strategizing together. Briala wants her Elvhenan firmly in Orlais, and Lavellan--Lavellan always has the world to save. But he does, too.   
  
She must have written it, because she folded a compliment into it. He looks at his hands and sees the ink has smeared onto them. Sighing, he dips a cloth napkin into his water and washes his hands and face. At least the croissant is fresh. At least this city is beautiful. At least she is his contemporary. The wind takes up, and he closes his eyes and breathes in the taste of the sea and petrichor. When he opens them, the rain has begun, and he draws into himself to keep warm. Solas wraps a hand around the cup and takes a sip. It is bitter, but it makes him feel better. The rain dots the flowers held in pots delineating the cafe grounds; he brushes a drop off a pansy. It is good to be alive. He does not deserve it, but it is good.   
  
The rain whispers the early morning, and Solas leans back in his chair and revels in it. He has the cafe almost entirely to himself, and the waiter approaches his table to watch others scurry from the Vhenadahl and their stoops and their balconies. Shutters close and other shutters reopen. A woman with bobbed hair glances out from one window. Solas recognizes her, she does not see him, and after surveying the piazza, she closes the window firmly. He smiles: such life, all beyond him! He supposes she found her revelry.   
  
A human man and an elvhen woman dart into the cafe. They are clearly together, but they do not touch. The man reaches for her hand when they settle at a table, her back to Solas, but he sees the woman pull the way.   
  
“What do you want?” Lavellan says. “I didn’t mean for this to turn to such shit.”   
  
Solas quietly leaves his table and pays his bill at the bar wordlessly. He leaves, knowing it would not matter if he hides his face--she has his walk memorized. He glances at their table .She is reaching for Anders’ hand now, and as he goes she looks up. His eyes meet hers but she looks away.


End file.
